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Sun, 02 Aug 2015 18:30:53 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Here’s New Horizons’ Stunning Last Photo of Plutohttp://nerdist.com/heres-new-horizons-stunning-last-photo-of-pluto/
http://nerdist.com/heres-new-horizons-stunning-last-photo-of-pluto/#commentsSat, 25 Jul 2015 16:30:02 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=282316On July 14th, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed a mission nearly a decade in the making and made a flyby of Pluto. It revealed Pluto’s beating heart and icy veins; it’s moon Charon has a space Mordor. But just seven hours after this historic meeting, New Horizons was a million miles away on the dark side of the dwarf planet.

Lucky, it took a picture to say goodbye.

Click to enlarge.

This lovely, back-lit picture was taken by New Horizons around midnight EDT on July 15th from 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. Not only is it beautiful, it’s informative. It shows Pluto’s “hazy” atmosphere extending 80 miles (130 kilometers) up from the surface. That’s several times higher than NASA scientists expected.

“My jaw was on the ground when I saw this first image of an alien atmosphere in the Kuiper Belt,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in a press release. “It reminds us that exploration brings us more than just incredible discoveries — it brings incredible beauty.”

The hazy look comes from the breakdown of methane in Pluto’s atmosphere. This breakdown allows for the formation of larger hydrocarbon gases — gases made of longer chains of hydrogen and carbon — that subsequently sink closer to Pluto’s surface and become frozen particles, which make up the layers of haze. When ultraviolet radiation from the Sun breaks down these hazes, tholins, or dark hydrocarbons, form and bestow the Plutonian land with a reddish color.

It was a surprise when Pluto’s hazes were found so far from the surface. So much so in fact that scientists aren’t quite sure what is going on; they will need new models of Pluto to explain it. Over the next year, New Horizons will send back the rest of the data it gathered flying by the king of the Kuiper Belt, and there are sure to be more surprises in store for us.

]]>http://nerdist.com/heres-new-horizons-stunning-last-photo-of-pluto/feed/0Earth’s Possible Twin Spotted by Our Planet-Hunting Spacecrafthttp://nerdist.com/earths-possible-twin-spotted-by-our-planet-hunting-spacecraft/
http://nerdist.com/earths-possible-twin-spotted-by-our-planet-hunting-spacecraft/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 21:00:01 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=281558We orbit the Sun in our system’s “Goldilocks zone.” Earth is close enough to its star that water stays liquid but far enough away that it doesn’t boil. For life on Earth, it’s just right. The thinking is that since those conditions are just right for us, life could arise somewhere else in the void if it, too, in is a Goldilocks zone.

Today, NASA has announced that its Kepler spacecraft has found a possibly Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone of a star very similar to our sun. Dubbed Kepler-452b (orbiting the star Kepler-452), this discovery brings to total number of confirmed exoplanets to 1,030, and Earth twins to 1.

But Kepler-452b isn’t Earth’s identical twin. The planet is estimated to be at least 60% larger in diameter. And though the Kepler spacecraft is too far away from Kepler-452b to determine mass, composition, or atmosphere, NASA scientists say that previous research suggests its size means that it could be rocky like Earth.

Our planet-hunting spacecraft doesn’t look for planets directly; Kepler stared at a small patch of sky from 2009-2013, waiting for tiny dips in stars’ brightnesses. When a star briefly dims, the thinking is that something passed between the spacecraft and the star’s light, like you putting your hand up shield your eyes from the sun. In this case, a large planet would be your hand.

Artistic concept of one possible appearance of Kepler-452b.

This “transit method” of exoplanet detection records those dips and infers the size of planets that made them. Since 2009, Kepler has been lucky to find a bounty of worlds beyond our system—planets have to pass in front of Kepler on roughly the same three-dimensional plane to be seen—and the candidate list is now up to 4,696.

Kepler got lucky again with 452b. It’s the smallest planet discovered in a habitable zone around a Sun-like star.

On Kepler 452b, you’d only have to wait a bit longer for your birthday: the planet is five percent further away from its sun than we are from ours, making a year span 385 days. However, its star is 1.5 billion years older than the Sun, 10 percent larger, and 20 percent brighter.

While 452b might be suitable for life, we won’t be visiting it any time soon—if ever. The planet orbits Kepler 452 over 1,400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. Getting there would be like taking a roadtrip lasting the age of the universe. That extreme distance is a problem for Kepler, too. Earth’s possible twin isn’t close enough to determine its mass or atmosphere, meaning that it’s not close enough to find out if Earth really has a sister planet.

And just to be sure, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute turned its telescopes towards the Kepler 452 system to see if six billion years in the habitable zone resulted in radio-emanating life like us. “No luck so far,” reportsNature.

This afternoon, Warner Bros. announced a partnership with James’ production company SpringHill Entertainment that would include film, TV, and digital projects. After fans spent hours in solemn prayer, hoping above all hope that this would finally mean a green-light for James’ long-in-development SpaceJam sequel, the Twitter account for WB‘s Roadshow Entertainment confirmed that Space Jam 2is really, really happening. No, this isn’t a joke. Yes, this entire post was written through a thick veil of tears.

Join Jessica Chobot and Nerdist Newswriter/Space Jam-enthusiast Ben Mekler for a celebration of all things Space Jam, speculation on what Space Jam 2 might be, and an open letter to Warner Bros. to hand the reins of the franchise to someone who truly deserves it – all on this Special Report!

Thanks for watching, don’t forget to use the hashtag #BenMeklerIsSpaceJam2 every day, and keep checking Nerdist.com for more Space Jam 2updates!

]]>http://nerdist.com/stop-literally-everything-space-jam-2-is-real/feed/0Apollo 11 Landing Recut to Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEYhttp://nerdist.com/apollo-11-landing-recut-to-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey/
http://nerdist.com/apollo-11-landing-recut-to-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey/#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 02:00:56 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=280172July 20th, as you’ve no doubt put together by now, is the anniversary of Apollo 11‘s historic landing on the Moon, whereupon Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two human beings to step foot on Earth’s only natural satellite. That was in 1969; a year prior to that, in 1968, Stanley Kubrick released his space epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey which was, to that point, the most accurate (or seemingly accurate) depiction of space travel, especially considering nobody had done it yet.

And then all the crazy conspiracy theories started up that said Kubrick was hired to fake the moon landing, or at least the footage. One guy, in Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary Room 237, maintains we did land on the moon, but all the footage of it was fabricated by Kubrick for the purposes of propaganda. Naturally, this man’s identity is hidden lest Aldrin drive to his house and punch him in the face.

To celebrate this 46th anniversary of the completely-real-and-totally-unfabricated moon landing, we present this: an editing of actual NASA footage (where available) into 2001. This was done by Nick Acosta, whom we’ve featured a few times on the site before, and it uses three of the film’s most indelible scenes and pieces of music.

Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube is used over footage of the rocket taking off, uncoupling, going in to orbit, and all of that stuff; György Ligeti’s super creepy Atmosphères is used for clips of the astronauts in deep space and going over the moon (this section features the most non-NASA footage); and finally the Richard Strauss tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra is used for shots of the actual moon landing, being truly one small step for (a) man and one giant leap for mankind.

Stay to the end for a little bit of fun, courtesy of the quite silly 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.

]]>http://nerdist.com/apollo-11-landing-recut-to-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey/feed/0Pluto’s System has Ice Mountains, Potato Moons, and a Space Mordorhttp://nerdist.com/pluto-has-ice-mountains-potato-moons-and-a-space-mordor/
http://nerdist.com/pluto-has-ice-mountains-potato-moons-and-a-space-mordor/#commentsThu, 16 Jul 2015 15:30:07 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=278647After a decade-long, 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has reached a new stage in its mission: sending 10-years of data, and with it, discovery, back to Earth. It’s been an exciting couple of days, so we’ve rounded up the latest news for you. But we guarantee this is just the beginning…

PLUTO HAS ICE MOUNTAINS

One of the first images returned to Earth shows a small portion of Pluto’s surface seen from 47,800 miles away. Ice mountains tower an impressive 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the smooth surface. The lack of craters indicates that the peaks are likely no more than 100 million years old which, when put in context of the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system, makes them newborn.“And they might still be growing,” says NASA Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team leader Jeff Moore.

Because Pluto’s surface would have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years, the only logical explanation for the lack of impact craters is recent geological activity. Think of it like a facelift for the planet (ok, ok, fine, “dwarf planet”); the rising of the ice would have virtually erased any pockmarks on the surface. If the theory is correct, then we’re looking at “one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” explains Moore.

METHANE MAYHEM

New Horizons did more than just take photos of Pluto during the flyby, it also took surface and atmospheric measurements to help us better understand what the celestial celebrity is made of. Pluto is composed largely of methane and nitrogen ice – that we already suspected – but new imagery shows that the concentration of these elements varies greatly from place to place.

“We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light,” explains New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy. “In the dark equatorial patches, the methane ice has shallower infrared absorptions indicative of a very different texture.”

What’s interesting is that neither methane nor nitrogen ice is strong enough to build the mountains we saw in the image above. Instead, a stiffer material, like water-ice, created the peaks. At Pluto’s sub-zero temperature, water-ice behaves more like rock.

PLUTO’S POTATO

Yes, dear Pluto is being orbited by a space potato (cough, cough, Spudnik, cough). Since its discovery in 2005, Pluto’s moon Hydra has been known only as a fuzzy dot of uncertain shape, and size. The image above was taken 400,000 miles from Hydra’s surface – and it might not look like much – but using the resolution (2 miles, or 3 kilometers per pixel), NASA now can see that the tiny potato-shaped moon measures 27 miles (43 kilometers) by 20 miles (33 kilometers) across.

ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO CHARON

A new image of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon shows a dark patch, informally called Mordor, at its north pole. We still don’t know what exactly is causing Mordor’s darkness (though we’re hoping it’s an army of Ice Giant/Orc fusion creatures), but later high-res imagery should shed some light on the mystery.

If you look to the right, you might notice the moon’s massive Canyon. at 4-6 miles deep, the chasm is a whopping 5 times as deep as the Grand Canyon (and just about as deep as the Mariana Trench).

And this is just everything we learned on day one.

_

ALL IMAGES: NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI, NASA Hubble, NASA New Horizons

]]>http://nerdist.com/pluto-has-ice-mountains-potato-moons-and-a-space-mordor/feed/0Feast Your Eyes on the Best Photo of Pluto Ever Takenhttp://nerdist.com/feast-your-eyes-on-the-best-photo-of-pluto-ever-taken/
http://nerdist.com/feast-your-eyes-on-the-best-photo-of-pluto-ever-taken/#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 20:00:06 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=277916When Pluto was demoted from planet to “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006, my fellow babies of the ’80s (and well, most everyone) went absolutely batshit. From protests and picket signs, to t-shirts and space swag, people around the world stepped up for the celestial body – as if it were one of their own. But who would have thought that nine years later, the little demotee would be the focus of one of the most historic space missions of our time.

At approximately 7:49am ET, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first ever to fly by the dwarf planet, completing its over 3-billion mile, decade-long journey to discover an alien world near the edge of our solar system. The journey represents our species’ unquenchable thirst for exploration and discovery. And People. Are. Stoked.

“It’s exciting to see the world excited about the solar system [again],” says Lights In the Dark space blogger Jason P. Major. “It’s that last world. It’s out there, at the edge (not exactly, but in common thinking it is.) Pluto is small. It got picked on by the IAU. And now it’s back with a vengeance. It’s the comeback KBO (Kuiper Belt Object).”

We won’t hear from the spacecraft until about 9PM EST, as it can’t actually look at Pluto and turn to communicate with Earth simultaneously, but as a teaser, NASA released the above image early this morning. Some 476,000 miles from the surface, Pluto nearly fills LORI’s frame – the last, and most detailed image that will be sent to Earth before the flyby.

“I don’t know what I expected to see,” says Major. “But it’s less ‘hazy’ than I imagined. That’s probably from years of looking at artists’ illustrations.”

New Horizons might be powered by a PlayStation (yes, really), but its onboard LORRI camera has the capability to snap photos 5,000 times larger than those shot by the Hubble Telescope – an amazing leap for science given that before NH, most artists gave the planet a purple hue, and our best photographs looked like this:

Each pixel in the new image represents 4 kilometers (about 2.5 miles), and it’s only a sliver of the resolution to come. “Pluto was discovered just 85 years ago by a farmer’s son from Kansas, inspired by a visionary from Boston, using a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona,” says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Today, science takes a great leap observing the Pluto system up close and flying into a new frontier that will help us better understand the origins of the solar system.”

Just what we’ll find remains a mystery, but that’s part of the excitement of the whole mission. We don’t know what we’re looking for, we don’t know what we’ll learn. “The view in the new image is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the ‘heart,’ which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. Much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes,” explains NASA.

“From the surface texture, I would be very surprised if there wasn’t an underground ocean,” adds Major. “It’s not a ‘dead’ world like some of Saturn’s moons – there’s something going on inside! We hope the closeups will tell us what.”

Because New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft ever launched – hurtling through the Pluto system at more than 30,000 mile per hour – a collision with a particle as small as a grain of rice could incapacitate the spacecraft. Once it reestablishes contact tonight, it will take 16 months to send its cache of data, 10 years’ worth, back to Earth. When asked about any atmospheric components, like clouds, Mission Director Alan Stern noted they hadn’t seen any in the images yet, nor any plumes. But it’s still early and there’s a lot more data to come.

“One thing’s for sure, the next few months are going to be full of discovery – like getting birthday gifts every week,” says Major.

—

ALL IMAGES:Bill Ingalls/NASA, NASA/APL/SwRI, HUBBLE

]]>http://nerdist.com/feast-your-eyes-on-the-best-photo-of-pluto-ever-taken/feed/0New Horizons is Almost at Pluto. Prepare for Feels with this Videohttp://nerdist.com/new-horizons-is-almost-at-pluto-prepare-for-feels-with-this-video/
http://nerdist.com/new-horizons-is-almost-at-pluto-prepare-for-feels-with-this-video/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 21:30:20 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=269470In just 20 days, we will arrive at Pluto. It’s an historic mission decades in the making, and it’s going to be the event to make every space-fan’s summer.

Pluto is, in many ways, the last unexplored frontier in our solar system. The planet (reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, but it’s still a fascinating body) was discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh as a dot moving slowly against the background of seemingly unmoving stars. The discovery added a new endpoint to our solar system that held for decades.

But we have never visited it. We haven’t really spent much time exploring the outer solar system beyond the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

In 1977, the twin Voyager spacecraft launched on their grand tours of the outer solar system. Both were launched on a multi-planet flyby trajectory through the Jovian and Saturnian systems, and Voyager 2 took advantage of the opportunity to also fly by Uranus and Neptune. But neither visited Pluto. And we haven’t sent anything that far into the solar system since, but not for lack of interest in the dwarf planet.

Finally, in 2001, NASA selected the New Horizons spacecraft to do the first in situ science from the vicinity of Pluto. Specifically, the spacecraft, which is about the size of a grand piano, was designed to look into Pluto’s atmosphere, a potential atmosphere on Pluto’s largest moon Charon, to detect other small satellites in the system that we can’t see from Earth, and to take color images of the body for the first time ever. The cameras on board the spacecraft will be able to resolve areas about the size of New York’s Central Park when seen from orbit.

New Horizons left the Earth on January 19, 2006, traveling faster than any other spacecraft. It reached Jupiter in just 13 months, but it’s still taken almost a decade to reach Pluto. But now that we’re on Pluto’s doorstep and nearing the closest encounter of the mission, we’re learning more about everyone’s favorite dwarf planet every day. In the mean time, let Erik Wernquist and the video above take you for a cosmic ride.

For mission updates during the month of July, be sure to follow @NewHorizons2015 on Twitter.

]]>http://nerdist.com/new-horizons-is-almost-at-pluto-prepare-for-feels-with-this-video/feed/0Explore the Hangar Where Soviet Spacecrafts go to Diehttp://nerdist.com/explore-the-hangar-where-soviet-spacecrafts-go-to-die/
http://nerdist.com/explore-the-hangar-where-soviet-spacecrafts-go-to-die/#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 23:00:20 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=266345Like something out of a post-apocalyptic film, Russian photographer and urban explorer Ralph Mirebs has uncovered a gem in the deserts of Kazakhstan. Deep within an abandoned hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome sit several ex-soviet spacecrafts, long-forgotten, alone, and silently turning to dust.

Hard as it is to imagine, the Cosmodrome was once a thriving launch complex – the very same that saw Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, take to the skies. The rocket that lifted Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit, was also launched from Baikonur.

“History spirals,” reflects Mirebs, who has dedicated much of his photographic career to documenting the industrial decline that followed the Cold War. “This is an objective process, repeated over and over again. You can regret for lost time and mourn the past greatness, but the facts remain through the ages.” It is these “breadcrumbs of greatness” that inspire Mirbebs to continue his work. “There’s an easy irony in that the birthplace of [Russia’s] cosmic expanses, would be its burial place and crypt.”

The shuttles (OK-1K2, OK-1K1, and OK-MT) all spawn from the 1974 Buran Program, which aimed to match NASA’s early success with the American Reusable Orbiter. Inside and out, these spacecrafts resembled their American counterparts – so well in fact, that many thought them to be exact replicas. It seemed likely that NASA’s plans had been leaked, but evidence from journals and work logs suggests that soviet engineers designed most of these mechanisms from scratch, with only a general knowledge of how the American ships worked. And in some ways, they did it better.

Both ships relied on hydrogen fuel cells to produce electricity and burned hydrazine to power on-board hydraulic systems, but the Soviet engineers built an entirely new launch system for Buran. “Instead of two relatively simple (but, as it turned out after the Challenger disaster, deadly unreliable) solid-rocket boosters, on the first stage, the Soviets employed four liquid-propellant rockets,” explains Anatoly Zak, editor of RussianSpaceWeb.com. “They also placed these engines into a separate rocket stage, rather than on the winged orbiter itself.”

The autonomous OK-1K1 could carry a cargo load of 95 tons, which dwarfed the 25-ton limit of the U.S. Space Shuttle. But in the end, being a heavy-lifter just wasn’t enough to win the space race. Buran’s maiden ship made just a single, unmanned flight before a lack of funding saw the program suspended, and then finally shut down in 1993.

Things only went downhill from there; the roof of the “MIK” building, where the shuttles were originally stored, collapsed in 2002, destroying OK-1K1 and killing eight people. Following the disaster, her sister ships were moved to the explosion-resistant hangar we see here.

“[The sight] is just magnificent,” says Mirebs. “They had to perform all kinds of work at different heights, but it was crucial that they didn’t touch the heat shield plates.” The cavernous hall is still lined with ghost platforms and hydraulic lifts, used by engineers past for decades. “[The shuttles] are still sitting in the transport units,” he says. “You can imagine their towering noses moving along those recessed rails in the floor.” You can hear it.

The fate of the Buran ships remains to be seen, but we’re certainly glad Mirebs was willing to share this piece of history with the world. His work is an homage to an ambitious time in soviet space exploration, one which some argue, we may never see again. “[In Russia], the romance of space is gone,” he says.

]]>http://nerdist.com/explore-the-hangar-where-soviet-spacecrafts-go-to-die/feed/0Go Inside the Tesseract from INTERSTELLARhttp://nerdist.com/go-inside-the-tesseract-from-interstellar/
http://nerdist.com/go-inside-the-tesseract-from-interstellar/#commentsSun, 14 Jun 2015 18:30:21 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=265369One of the most visually arresting sequences from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was the scene in which Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) found himself inside of a Tesseract near the end of the movie.

A Tesseract is a theoretical construct that exists beyond the three dimensions that we can perceive. And even the team behind Interstellar had a difficult time grasping the Tesseract and finding a way to convey what it is on the screen.

“A Tesseract is the three dimensional shadow of a four dimensional hypercube that’s been unfolded,” explains VFX Supervisor Paul Franklin in “Interstellar – Across All Dimensions and Time,” a featurette from the Interstellar Blu-ray which has popped up online.

Franklin clears up some of the misconceptions about the Tesseract during the early part of the video. For example, he states that Cooper isn’t actually traveling backwards in time. In the Tesseract, Cooper exists outside of time, but only in a single place: the bedroom of his daughter, Murph (who was played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and by Jessica Chastain as an adult).

“[Coop] can send a message into normal spacetime,” continued Franklin. “And he can physically move these worldlines or extrusions as we call them. That sends a wave traveling along these things and that enters the room and affects the objects that are inside the room. This made perfect sense because according to Einstein, that’s what gravity is. Gravity is a wave that propagates through spacetime.”

For his part, McConaughey put the Tesseract into an emotional context. “Love is spacetime,” he said. “Love is that fifth dimension. Love is that thing that travels through time, forwards, backwards, up and down.”

The truly remarkable thing that comes out of this featurette is the way that Nolan and his team brought the Tesseract to life. CGI trickery was kept to a minimum, as actual sets were constructed, with wire work and projectors used to create the illusion of the Tesseract on screen. It’s an amazing accomplishment, especially when the featurette depicts the scope of the Tesseract set.

What are your thoughts on the Tesseract sequence from Interstellar? Travel across spacetime and share a message in our comment section below!

]]>http://nerdist.com/go-inside-the-tesseract-from-interstellar/feed/0Philae, the Little Comet Lander that Could, Wakes Uphttp://nerdist.com/philae-the-little-comet-lander-that-could-wakes-up/
http://nerdist.com/philae-the-little-comet-lander-that-could-wakes-up/#commentsSun, 14 Jun 2015 16:15:34 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=265751Last November we landed a washing machine-sized box of science on a comet (comet 67P to be exact). This box, named Philae, was the culmination 87,000 hours of spaceflight, but when it landed on comet 67P, it had only 60 hours to work with. The landing didn’t quite go according to plan — little Philae bounced a kilometer up into the wispy atmosphere of comet 67P and landed in a shadowed crater. It had some time, but soon the lack of sunlight would force the solar-powered lander into hibernation. Less than three days after it landed, Philae went to sleep, and scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) didn’t know if it would ever wake up.

Late Saturday night, Philae woke up.

The ESA reports that last night Philae “spoke” with scientists back on Earth (via its spacecraft Rosetta) for 85 seconds, sending back 300 “packets” of data.

“Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” said Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.”

An awake Philae is great news. Though the lander completed much of the science it set out to do — analyzing surface and atmospheric composition, taking photos, measuring magnetic fields — there is still a wellspring of data, 8,000 packets-worth, in its banks that never got to transmit home.

Since Philae’s hibernation, comet 67P has moved closer to the Sun, ostensibly offering enough sunlight to wake it up. But the lander appears to have woken up before last night. Historical data now available indicates that Philae was functioning earlier than June 13th, but unable to phone home. Now we’re listening.

]]>http://nerdist.com/philae-the-little-comet-lander-that-could-wakes-up/feed/0Here’s What it Would Look like if Black Holes Hung in the Night Skyhttp://nerdist.com/heres-what-it-would-look-like-if-nebulae-hung-in-the-night-sky/
http://nerdist.com/heres-what-it-would-look-like-if-nebulae-hung-in-the-night-sky/#commentsThu, 04 Jun 2015 20:00:04 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=261602Back in January, the Russian space agency Roscosmos released a video showing what it might look like if our star, the Sun, was replaced by different stars or planets. A couple of weeks ago, the agency released a follow-up video showing what the night sky might look like if some celestial bodies were much closer to us than they are. In short, it would be beautiful.

So to give this video some scale, the nearest star to our solar system (aside from the Sun, that is), is the triple star system Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri A and B orbit quite closely together such that, to the naked eye, they look like one star. Their companion is the comparatively dimmer Proxima Centauri. And they’re far away; the binary pair is about 4.37 light years from the Earth and Proxima Centauri is slightly closer, lying 4.24 light years away. Bringing any objects into sharp focus in the night sky is bringing them tens of trillions of miles closer.

First up is the Andromeda Galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy’s nearest neighbor that sits some 2.3 million light years away. To the naked eye, this galaxy containing 1 trillion stars spanning about 220,000 light years looks like a smudge a little larger than the full Moon.

Next is the Ring Nebula, a 6,000-year-old nebula about 1 light year across that really sits about 2,000 light years from our planet. Then comes the Crab Nebula, the 5-light year-wide remnant of a supernova that blew up in 1054. In reality, it sits some 6,500 light years from Earth.

The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules is beautifully positioned with a monument to Yuri Gagarin in the foreground, so it looks like the first man in space is striving to reach what astronomers consider to be the finest cluster in our night sky.

Over a busy highway, the video imagines a supernova star. The Whirlpool galaxy is shown interacting with NGC 5195, perhaps alluding to our own Milky Way galaxy’s collision course with Andromeda. The Pleiades is also brought up close in our night sky, a cluster of seven stars that can be seen by just about every inhabited part of our planet.

The last image of the video is a pretty fantastic one, showing a black hole glowing bright in the daytime sky as gas and dust heats up around its event horizon.

Of course, beautiful as they may be, if any of those object were close enough be seeing detail in the night sky, the Earth probably wouldn’t exist. It’s a good thing they, and their strong gravitational pulls, are safely away from us.

]]>http://nerdist.com/heres-what-it-would-look-like-if-nebulae-hung-in-the-night-sky/feed/0Astronauts Would See Brilliant Blue Auroras on Marshttp://nerdist.com/astronauts-would-see-brilliant-blue-auroras-on-mars/
http://nerdist.com/astronauts-would-see-brilliant-blue-auroras-on-mars/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 21:00:07 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=261179If we ever set foot on the southern hemisphere of Mars, our first Martians might be in for an azure light show (simulated above). Mars has almost all the same astronomical phenomena as we see on Earth, only they look totally different. That includes auroras.

An international team of scientists from NASA, the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble, the European Space Agency, and Aalto University in Finland recently predicted that auroras can be seen on Mars. The first data came from the SPICAM imaging instrument on ESA’s Mars Express satellite, which saw auroras from space in 2005, findings that were confirmed in March of this year by NASA’s MAVEN mission.

Auroras, like the famous aurora borealis, are caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with a planet’s magnetic field. As these particles enter the atmosphere, they excite atoms and molecules, and as they release energy to “calm down,” the particles produce light. On Earth, we see auroras as green and red with some occasional blue-purple hues in the mix.

But Mars doesn’t have much of an atmosphere or a magnetic field; it’s so small the solar wind has all but stripped both entirely away. So how can Mars have any kind of night lights?

An artist’s interpretation of what auroras may look like close to magnetic anomalies on Mars.

It’s true that Mars’ global magnetic field essentially shut down about 3.5 billion years ago, but the planet still has smaller, localized magnetic fields that are about 3,000 times less powerful than the Earth’s. They’re called crustal magnetic anomalies, and they’re rooted in Mars’ surface, predominantly in the southern hemisphere — the south is far higher and more rugged than the northern half of the planet.

The Earth’s magnetic field is supported by an internal dynamo of spinning metal. We know Mars had a magnetic field at one point, so it also likely had an internal dynamo that has since shut down. That means any rocks forming during the time of an active dynamo would be magnetized, and so the rocky southern hemisphere is more magnetized than the northern hemisphere. Rocks formed after the dynamo shut down are similarly not magnetized. But that’s only part of the story. Scientists have predicted, through computer models, that if Mars’ northern hemisphere core-mantle boundary was hotter than the southern equivalent, only this latter half would be strongly magnetized.

Either way, it’s consistent with these theories that Martian auroras are only predicted in the southern hemisphere. And astronauts ambling along the planet’s red soil would look up to see predominantly blue light with some red and green hues.

]]>http://nerdist.com/astronauts-would-see-brilliant-blue-auroras-on-mars/feed/0The International Space Station Might Become a Real-World DEATH STARhttp://nerdist.com/the-international-space-station-might-become-a-real-world-death-star/
http://nerdist.com/the-international-space-station-might-become-a-real-world-death-star/#commentsTue, 26 May 2015 15:00:28 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=257206Great news, moon-sized weapon enthusiasts! Japanese scientists just proposed that we attach a high-powered laser to the International Space Station to help it obliterate space junk. Sound familiar? Yeah, folks — we’re getting a Death Star.

Join Nerdist science editor and guest host Kyle Hill as he breaks down the ISS laser, from how it works and why we want one to how likely it is that we’ll see it put into action!

Thanks for watching today’s show, get more Kyle on the latest Because Science, and let us know in the comments below how pumped you are for a real-world Death Star!

]]>http://nerdist.com/the-international-space-station-might-become-a-real-world-death-star/feed/0’50s DISNEYLAND TV Show’s Tomorrowland Gave Us Bright and Fascinating Futurehttp://nerdist.com/50s-disneyland-tv-shows-tomorrowland-gave-us-bright-and-fascinating-future/
http://nerdist.com/50s-disneyland-tv-shows-tomorrowland-gave-us-bright-and-fascinating-future/#commentsThu, 21 May 2015 19:00:01 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=256519Disney’s Tomorrowland movie may be coming out this weekend, but the desire for a utopian look at the future is something that dates back to before there was even a Disneyland theme park. It’s still what the future ought to look like.

Walt Disney, for all his faults, was an undisputed genius when it came to marketing and ideas. While classics now, many of Disney’s animated films in the 1940s were too expensive to make and didn’t garner much in the way of profit. But they were beloved, and Walt knew that. In the early 1950s, plans were begun for a massive land-buying endeavor in Anaheim, CA, which would eventually become Disneyland. Walt had the land purchased under different company names so that no one would know it was all Walt’s and it was all going to be one enormous attraction (they’d have charged a ton more if they’d known, surely). But buying the land wasn’t the only thing Disney had to do to make the park a reality.

In order to obtain the necessary funds to actually build Disneyland the park, Disney proposed a weekly television series, that he himself would host, that would both get people excited for the park and its four quadrants (Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland) and would also finance the building of the thing itself. It was brilliant! Both CBS and NBC turned him down, so he signed a deal with ABC and the series, called Disneyland, was born, running from 1954 until 1958 when it became Walt Disney Presents. It was a huge hit; the park was financed and opened on July 17th, 1955.

I tell you this history of the Disneyland TV series so you know how and why the following things were produced. Each week, that series would bring a different hour-long something to viewers. Sometimes it’d be a drama (like the serialized Davy Crockett adventures), sometimes it’d be some of Walt’s earlier animated shorts, and sometimes, when it would be a “Tomorrowland” segment, it would be gorgeous, intricate, and ultimately very speculative ideas of what the world would be like when we traveled in space.

Now, this was the mid-50s and man would not reach space until 1961 when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space and orbit the Earth. For the Tomorrowland segments of the show, of which there were but a few, Disney used a mixture of gorgeous, art-decoish animation and live action representations to give a, at that point, “accurate” representation of what space travel might be like. And truly, our dream of Tomorrow proved much grander than reality, as evidenced by my favorite of the episodes, “Mars and Beyond” which aired December 4, 1957, in which narrator Paul Frees and some of what I consider Disney’s finest and most breathtaking animated sequences to illustrate a possible trip to Mars, which of course, humanity has yet to accomplish, although many are trying now.

You can watch the episode in its entirety below.

This episode is full of fantasy more so than hard science, and not just because we never actually made it to Mars. It talks about strange creatures and alien species we could POSSIBLY see when we reached Mars. At this point, we had no idea what Mars even looked like beyond it being red, and people still thought there might be atmosphere like our own planet. Remember, everyone in the ’50s was afraid of Martian invasion and that lasted until, about, 2011 (give or take). We had no idea that Mars was impossibly cold compared to here, many assuming that it must be the exact opposite.

That said, there is a lot of basic science in this that would have given young viewers the building blocks of learning, and possessed enough wonderment and whimsy to probably make young, budding scientists out of many of the boys and girls watching at home. Hell, I’m 31 and live in 2015 and even I’m excited by all of this stuff. That’s really the wonder of both the Tomorrowland TV episodes and the entire ethos of that part of Disneyland; it’s about hoping and learning and believing that the future can and should be a better, brighter place. Yes, it’s a little hokey and very of its time, but it reminds us there was a time when the future seemed idyllic and magical, and not post-apocalyptic at all.

If you’d like to see all of Disneyland‘s “Tomorrowland” segments, I’ve got a handy dandy playlist for you below.

]]>http://nerdist.com/50s-disneyland-tv-shows-tomorrowland-gave-us-bright-and-fascinating-future/feed/0Bill Nye and The Planetary Society Successfully Launch LightSailhttp://nerdist.com/bill-nye-and-the-planetary-society-successfully-launch-lightsail/
http://nerdist.com/bill-nye-and-the-planetary-society-successfully-launch-lightsail/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 18:30:05 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=256051Earlier this morning, Bill Nye — now The Planetary Society guy — and his team successfully launched their “LightSail” spacecraft into space aboard an Atlas V rocket (as part of a secondary payload on the US Air Force’s X-37B space plane mission). For the next four weeks, this tiny “CubeSat” or breadbox-sized, low-cost satellite will orbit in our atmosphere and eventually unfurl its sails.

Solar sailing was first popularized by the late, great Carl Sagan on the Johnny Carson show. Since then, The Planetary Society (of which Nye is the CEO) has picked up where Sagan left off. With a fully-funded Kickstarter campaign supporting them, Nye and the Society hope to prove the feasibility of solar sailing starting with this initial test. However, the LightSail will not make it high enough on today’s launch to see if it can harness the cosmic wind.

“The 2015 test flight will not carry the spacecraft high enough to escape Earth’s atmospheric drag, and will thus not demonstrate controlled solar sailing,” said The Planetary Society in a press release. “Once in orbit, the spacecraft will go through a checkout and testing period of about four weeks before deploying its solar sails.” After that, the tiny spacecraft will be directed to burn up above our heads.

Solar sailing works by harnessing the miniscule momentum carried by photons streaming in from the stars. These photons strike the boxing-ring sized Mylar sails on LightSail, and donate their momentum bit by bit. It’s a slow start, but over time, the constant acceleration of LightSail will add up, eventually eclipsing speeds attainable through traditional chemical rockets.

The launch of LightSail represents more than just trying out photon fuel. LightSail is a method of propulsion, yes, but it’s not a specific way to examine space. The innovation here would be to take advantage of the fact that solar sails could accompany any low-cost CubeSat to open up space exploration to universities and the public alike.

]]>http://nerdist.com/bill-nye-and-the-planetary-society-successfully-launch-lightsail/feed/0Go Download SpaceX’s Vintage Mars Travel Postershttp://nerdist.com/go-download-spacexs-vintage-mars-travel-posters/
http://nerdist.com/go-download-spacexs-vintage-mars-travel-posters/#commentsSun, 17 May 2015 00:30:51 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=254903Attention Musk-eteers: We’ve got some new posters to play with. With all the recent talk of Tesla super-batteries and psychotically fast Hyperloop trains, it’s easy to forget that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has a foot in the race to the Red Planet. But the latest additions to the SpaceX photo gallery have our eyes on the skies once again: Badass vintage-inspired Mars travel posters.

Like the NASA exoplanet ads before them, the Mars posters portray an optimistic future in a ’50s style that’s perfectly timed for the upcoming (squee) release of Disney’s Tomorrowland. Of course, there are still some major kinks in the mission-to-mars plan (like, you know, incinerating everyone on impact) but when it comes to campaign art, we’re giving ol’ Muskie an A+. Jet packs, spandex, black rubber gloves … all we’re missing here are ray guns.

Valles Marineris is a canyon system that runs along the Martian equator. It’s seven-miles deep (that’s four-times deeper than the Grand Canyon), but fear not: SpaceX clearly plans to supply all space-cationers with jet packs for maximum fun. (A brief pause to remind yourself that we have jet packs).

We can only assume that by immortalizing Olympus, Musk is leaking clues about the volcano lair he promised us. At 374 miles in diameter (approximately the same size as the state of Arizona), Olympus is the largest shield volcano in our solar system. If you’re only going to explore one poster in high resolution, this would be the one. See those tiny people in each gondola? Of course you don’t. Download the damn poster.

The series also features Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are among the smallest known. But this extraterrestrial destination won’t be around forever. Phobos, the larger of the lunar pair, is actually spiraling inward and expected to break apart or crash into Mars sometime in the next 50 million years. Get it while it’s hot.

]]>http://nerdist.com/go-download-spacexs-vintage-mars-travel-posters/feed/0Become a Part of Bill Nye’s Solar Sailing Spacecraft Teamhttp://nerdist.com/become-a-part-of-bill-nyes-solar-sailing-spacecraft-team/
http://nerdist.com/become-a-part-of-bill-nyes-solar-sailing-spacecraft-team/#commentsWed, 13 May 2015 21:30:44 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=253611We all know him as The Science Guy, but Bill Nye isn’t just into science communication anymore — he’s launching spacecraft that fly with photons.

As CEO of The Planetary Society, Nye is now looking to increase citizen access to space. The society wants to do it by picking up a project that the late, great Carl Sagan once introduced on the Johnny Carson show: a solar sailing spacecraft. Solar sails are a way for spacecraft to accelerate through the void without the need for fuel. The idea is that photons from the Sun and other stars bounce off large mylar sails and impart their momentum. The result is a spacecraft that won’t start off very fast, but could eventually (through constant acceleration) surpass the speeds of traditional chemical rockets.

After launch, a solar sailed spacecraft about the size of a bread box would unfurl to the size of a boxing ring and carry small cube satellites or “cubesats” into space. The affordability and flexibility of these cubesats is what will allow citizens and universities to conduct their own adventures in space. It’s also what Bill Nye needs our help with:

Now fully funded (but can use every cent), The Planetary Society’s LightSail project is offering stretch goals to help flesh out the various aspects of its mission. You can still get patches, t-shirts, attend the launch, and even get a lunch with Bill Nye (…for $10K). The first launch of the LightSail will happen next Wednesday the 20th when it hitches a ride on an Atlas V rocket to sort out the kinks of deployment in microgravity before another cubesat actually sails (the first one will burn up in the atmosphere). The first official flight with light mission is scheduled for 2016.

Better yet, when LightSail is up and running, the Society says you should be able to see its reflected light from here on Earth, and will have resources available if you want to catch a glimpse. You can help citizens connect with space and actually see that connection.

]]>http://nerdist.com/become-a-part-of-bill-nyes-solar-sailing-spacecraft-team/feed/0Sokka’s Meteorite Sword is Real, and it’s Hiding in Japanhttp://nerdist.com/sokkas-meteorite-sword-is-real-and-its-hiding-in-japan/
http://nerdist.com/sokkas-meteorite-sword-is-real-and-its-hiding-in-japan/#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 21:30:47 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=253108Let’s be honest: Sokka was the Ma-Ti of the Avatar the Last Airbender universe. Without any bending powers, he was just a kid with a boomerang and some sub-par one liners. But then, he got a space sword.

During his time under Fire Nation sword-master Piandao, Sokka forged a sword out of a fallen meteorite, giving him an instant cred boost, and the power to help his friends in battle. As it turns out, the meteorite sword is real, and it’s sitting in Japan’s tallest building.

Introducing: “The Sword of Heaven,” a katana forged from a four-billion-year old meteor. (Of course, Sokka’s sword was a Jian, a Chinese straight sword, but we’re going to let that slide. Because, space sword.)

The katana, which sits on display at the base of the Tokyo Skytree, was made by Japan’s foremost sword smith, Yoshindo Yoshiwara, from a piece of the Gibeon meteorite, an iron space-rock found near the town of Gibeon, Namibia in 1838. “I never compromise [my craft],” explains Yoshiwara. “It is easy to make a compromise. But we hold our prides and devotes our lives into creating swords.”

You might notice that the polished katana isn’t the same color as the meteorite. This all has to do with what happens to a meteor when it hits Earth’s atmosphere. While soaring through space, the original meteor would have appeared that same bright, reflective silver, but extreme heat causes elements in the outer-most layer to melt and fuse together, resulting in regmaglypts, those dark “thumb prints” you can see in the photo.

This isn’t the first time a Legend of Korra-worthy blade has been forged: nerd-tastic metalsmith extraordinaire Tony Swatton created an exact replica of the piece in 2013.

]]>http://nerdist.com/sokkas-meteorite-sword-is-real-and-its-hiding-in-japan/feed/0To Impress J.J. Abrams, Two Guys from Essex Sent a Toy X-Wing to Spacehttp://nerdist.com/to-impress-j-j-abrams-two-guys-from-essex-sent-a-toy-x-wing-to-space/
http://nerdist.com/to-impress-j-j-abrams-two-guys-from-essex-sent-a-toy-x-wing-to-space/#commentsMon, 11 May 2015 21:30:33 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=252222In a bid to impress Star Wars: The Force Awakensdirector J.J. Abrams, U.K. astro-photography enthusiasts Phil J Pier and Matt Kingsworth did the only appropriate thing: they sent a Star Wars toy into space, S-foils locked and ready for attack. (Well, near-space … but we’ll give it to them.)

The pair are the masterminds behind Project Helium Tears (PHT), an independent cohort of amateur photographers united by their passion for astronomy, and desire to help nerd kind. Sending camera-carting weather balloons into the stratosphere is business as usual for the PHT team, but bringing the iconic starfighter along for the ride was a shameless attempt at landing tickets to the SWTFA film premier. “Those kinds of requests, well, usually end in ‘no,'” they say. “We know Abrams likes practical effects and shooting in real locations, and we love that there are X-Wings in the new film so [this seemed like the perfect move].”

The X-Wing made it 33 kilometers (just over 20 miles) up, before finally making its descent back to Earth– not too shabby when you consider Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking Red Bull Stratos jump was made from just 38 km. “We know we were only a third of the way there Kármán line, [the end of our atmosphere], but it was our first launch and it was space enough for us!” Whether the stunt will catch Abrams’ attention remains to be seen, but we’re giving them an A for effort. Hell, they even got the sun to cooperate for a signature Abrams lens flare.

You can follow along with any future launches using #HeyJJ

Images: Project Helium Tears

]]>http://nerdist.com/to-impress-j-j-abrams-two-guys-from-essex-sent-a-toy-x-wing-to-space/feed/0The Only Place Objects Spin This Weirdly is in Spacehttp://nerdist.com/the-only-place-objects-spin-this-weirdly-is-in-space/
http://nerdist.com/the-only-place-objects-spin-this-weirdly-is-in-space/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 20:30:51 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=251587Imagine you are an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. Your “day” is taken up mostly by conducting experiments, making repairs, and communicating with Earth. But you’re in space! You can’t help but take some time to explore the physics that can only be seen while perpetually falling around our planet. And one of the cooler things you’ll see happens as a result of just spinning something around:

What is going on here? Why is this small handle flitting around like an extraterrestrial hummingbird? In a recently Q&A with astronaut Scott Kelly, we actually got to ask him a question about this odd rotation while he was orbiting above us:

The motion does look like something that could only happen in space, but what is going on here is actually a famous principle from 19th century classical physics that applies everywhere — the intermediate axis theorem.

Imagine flipping a tennis racket down here on Earth. It can spin without tumbling erratically along two of three principal axes, y and z (passing through the COM or Center of Mass):

In this example, the most stable rotations happen around the y and z axes. However, try to spin the racket around the x axis, like you might do towards yourself after rocketing a ball down a baseline, and the racket tumbles and spins before returning to your hand. This is because the x axis is the intermediate axis of rotation, in between the minor and major axes. Because the racket is compelled by physics to return to spinning around the y or z axis, any extra movement flips the racket and causes it to tumble.

So the Leatherman tool and the ISS handle above are tumbling and flipping between axes because the astronauts are giving each spin a bit of a wobble that the objects are exquisitely sensitive to along their intermediate axes of rotation!

On Earth, we can’t really see this weirdness when we’re flipping tennis rackets because there isn’t enough time to see it (and there’s that pesky thing called gravity). That’s why space is so awesome — it’s a playground for science.

]]>http://nerdist.com/the-only-place-objects-spin-this-weirdly-is-in-space/feed/0NASA’s Curiosity Rover Shows a Stunning Martian Sunset from Last Monthhttp://nerdist.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-shows-a-stunning-martian-sunset-from-last-month/
http://nerdist.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-shows-a-stunning-martian-sunset-from-last-month/#commentsThu, 07 May 2015 20:00:32 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=251176It’s hard to make Mars feel real. We know that it’s a real planet of course, but without stepping onto the surface yourself, even real pictures taken by our rovers feel surreal. Finding a connection to life on Earth can do the trick.

In the middle of last month, NASA’s Curiosity rover turned its powerful Mastcam-100 camera towards Gale Crater on sol 956 (April 15, 2015) and snapped these haunting photos of a Martian sunset. Somehow, knowing that Mars has sunsets too makes it feel more like a real place:

“I had to process them through GIMP with GMIC in order to rebuild the colors,” Bouic explained. “A little processing in Pixelmator to remove these ugly white stripes due to overloaded pixels; a little bit of denoising to remove artifacts of the Bayer matrix, and voila!”

Bouic also processed some close-up images of Sol’s setting from the Mastcam-100:

Finally, Bouic made a comparison photo showing the colors of the Martian sky at its midday and at sunset:

]]>http://nerdist.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-shows-a-stunning-martian-sunset-from-last-month/feed/0With Help From a PlayStation, NASA’s New Horizons Detects Possible Ice on Plutohttp://nerdist.com/with-help-from-a-playstation-nasas-new-horizons-detects-possible-ice-on-pluto/
http://nerdist.com/with-help-from-a-playstation-nasas-new-horizons-detects-possible-ice-on-pluto/#commentsFri, 01 May 2015 00:00:09 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=248752For the first time ever, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed bright and dark regions, including a possible polar ice cap, on the surface of the Pluto – and it’s all thanks to a PlayStation CPU.

Yes, the MIPS R3000 CPU that let us hone our mercenary skills as Cloud Strife back in ’97 is now flying through space at 36,373 mph transmitting data from a space probe bound for our favorite once-planet, three-billion miles from Earth. No big deal. “As we get closer, the excitement is building in our quest to unravel the mysteries of Pluto using data from New Horizons,” says associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld.

The new images were captured using the spacecraft’s telescopic Long-Range – and we do mean long: 70-million miles long – Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera. Once beamed down to Earth, a technique called image deconvolution, an algorithm-based process that helps sharpen huge amounts of data, helped reveal a more-detailed look at Pluto’s surface than ever before. Ultimately, LORRI’s photos will have a resolution 5,000 times larger than those shot by the Hubble Telescope.

“This series of New Horizons images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken at 13 different times spanning 6.5 days, starting on April 12 and ending on April 18, 2015.”

“As we approach the Pluto system we are starting to see intriguing features such as a bright region near Pluto’s visible pole, starting the great scientific adventure to understand this enigmatic celestial object,” says Grunsfeld.

Because Pluto is tipped on its side, New Horizons is able to keep a watchful eye on its polar regions – one of which appears consistently brighter than other areas. Scientists suspect the pole is covered by a highly reflective cap of nitrogen ice. New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern notes that it’s rare to see a planet displaying these strong surface markings at such a far distance. “If you had similar images of Mercury, or images of even Mars, you would not see the same kinds of big surface units going by as you do here on Pluto,” he told Reuters. “It’s very promising.”

New Horizons and its PS1 processor has been missioning to Pluto since 2006 – the same year we greedy bastards upgraded to PS3. “After traveling for so long, it’s stunning to see Pluto, literally a dot of light as seen from Earth, becoming a real place right before our eyes,” says Stern. New Horizons is set to pass over Pluto in mid July before continuing on to the outer fringe of our solar system. We can only imagine what it will see next.

]]>http://nerdist.com/with-help-from-a-playstation-nasas-new-horizons-detects-possible-ice-on-pluto/feed/0For Hubble’s 25th, Some of Our All-Time Favorite Space Photoshttp://nerdist.com/for-hubbles-25th-some-of-our-all-time-favorite-space-photos/
http://nerdist.com/for-hubbles-25th-some-of-our-all-time-favorite-space-photos/#commentsSun, 26 Apr 2015 21:30:00 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=246899The Hubble telescope is officially 25-years-old and ready for its quarter-life crisis. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has orbited our planet 137,000 times, offering up an otherwise-impossible view of the expanding forever, unhindered by our pesky, light-blocking atmosphere. Hubble has helped unravel some of astronomy’s biggest mysteries, like the age of the universe (now thought to be 13 to 14 billion-years-old) and it wouldn’t be right to let this birthday go unnoticed. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite images from the past 25 years of orbiting-telescope badassery.

Oh, just a star. Or two. Or 100,000. Hubble snapped this view of the crowded core of giant star cluster Omega Centauri in 2009. The image reveals a small, hundred-thousand-star region (tiny, right?) inside the globular cluster, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. These ancient swarms of stars are united by gravity, and are thought to be between 10 billion and 12 billion years old.

This portrait of the Helix Nebula offers a look down what is actually a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases. If you started running now, you’d make it to the end in oh – just over 14-billion years. Helix’s fluorescing tube is pointed almost directly at Earth, so we perceive it as more of a ‘bubble’ than a cylinder. A forest of thousands of comet-like filaments, embedded along the inner rim of the nebula, points back toward the central star, which is a small, super-hot white dwarf.

Hubble snapped this series of Saturn’s south pole aurora over a period of several days. As they do on Earth, the ringed planet’s auroras move around on some days and stay put on others, but compared with our “nothern lights,” which develop in about 10 minutes and may last for a few hours, Saturn’s auroral displays last for several days. These spectacles occur when charged particles in space collide with a planet’s magnetic field. The charged particles are accelerated to high energies and stream into the upper atmosphere where they collide with gasses, producing brilliant flashes of glowing energy in the form of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light.

The butterfly effect

Don’t let its dainty appearance fool you: the wings of the Butterfly Nebula are actually cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes. Like all nebulae, this fury was caused by the death of a star, and represents one of the main sources of carbon in the universe, which we – in the end – are all made of!

It might not look like much, but streaming out of the center of galaxy M87 is one of space’s most amazing phenomenons: a black-hole-powered stream of electrons and other subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed. Cosmic laser, anyone? What you see in this image is the blue electron jet contrasted with the yellow glow from billions of unseen stars in the galaxy.

Known by some as “Glinda’s Bubble,” this celestial orb has slightly more menacing beginnings than Dorothy’s good witch. Remnant 0509-67.5 is what’s left after a supernova occurred 400 years ago (for earth viewers). This combination of visible light and X-ray shows the ambient gasses being shocked by the expanding blast wave from the supernova.

Back in 2004, Hubble did something big (it found space Sauron, obviously): it captured the first visible-light image of a planet around another star. Using what is called a coronographic mask, which basically works like sunglasses for a telescope lens, Hubble blocked out light the from the star Fomalhaut, exposing this encircling dust ring. Because the dust ring’s shape was pulled off-center, NASA scientists suspected a hidden planet. The box on the right shows two images of what is now called planet Fomalhaut b, captured in 2004 and 2006.

Galactic Frenemies

The colliding Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image by Hubble, Harvard’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (see what happens when we all work together?). The epic collision, which began more than 100-million years ago and is still occurring now, has triggered the formation of millions of stars.

Introducing: The Sombrero Galaxy, a spiral galaxy seen nearly edge-on. Early astronomers thought the galactic hat was just a luminous ring of gas surrounding a young star, but in 1912, astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher discovered the object appeared to be rushing away from us at 700 miles per second. This enormous velocity offered some of the earliest clues that the Sombrero was really another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions. The galaxy is 50,000 lightyears across (about one-fifth the diameter of our moon), and this photo is actually a composite of six – one of the largest mosaics ever created by Hubble!

This dizzying stellar grouping is called R136. It’s only a few million years old, but many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the largest stars ever observed. Several of them are over 100-times bigger than our Sun! NASA explains that these heavyweight stars are destined to pop off, “like a string of firecrackers,” as supernovae in the next few million years. Keep your eyes on the skies, folks.

It would be criminal not to end with this photo we’ve written about before – because WTF. You’re looking at an invisible object, nearly 10-billion lightyears away. This is perhaps the most spectacular example of gravitational lensing – where the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy (seen here in gold) bends and amplifies the light of a more distant galaxy (that crazy blue ring) – ever documented. It’s hard to wrap your mind around, but that blue ring of light has been warped nearly 90 degrees from its original position by gravity, essentially letting you see through the galaxy that’s blocking it. Science, we love you.

If you’re an astrophotophile like me and want to view these images (and hundreds of others!) in their full, high-res glory, head over to the Gallery!

]]>http://nerdist.com/for-hubbles-25th-some-of-our-all-time-favorite-space-photos/feed/0Travel Posters Imagine Our Future in the Solar Systemhttp://nerdist.com/travel-posters-imagine-our-future-in-the-solar-system/
http://nerdist.com/travel-posters-imagine-our-future-in-the-solar-system/#commentsThu, 23 Apr 2015 18:30:40 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=245618We don’t know when we’ll get off this planet. Even getting a human on the surface of Mars could take another two decades. But we know we have to leave Earth. Eventually, our resources will run out (or the Sun will expand and vaporize us, whatever comes first) and we’ll need another home. If we are successful, maybe we can unlock the solar system and turn it into the utopia that the travel posters below depict it as.

Created by the artists at Science Hype, the Futuristic Planet Series imagines an exhausted Earth and a solar system open to interplanetary travel. Like our current extraterrestrial aspirations, Mars, or “New Earth,” is our next stop:

But after we’re established on a new planet and have all the rocket science squared, the solar system is our oyster. Maybe we could gaze into the clouds surrounding our Venutian apartments:

Tourists will blast around the rings of Saturn like they drove around the curves of the Grand Canyon. The ice hotels of Europa would be booked solar year-round. Thrill-seekers could float in the dense atmosphere of Jupiter and try to avoid the giant storms. You can check out the rest of the posters in the gallery below.

You can grab a set of travel poster prints here, shirts and assorted accessories here, and order nine prints in one complete package here.